I often think I was born in the wrong century. I guess playing a game or reading a book about such things is likely a lot easier than actually living in those times, but there’s just something about castles and knights and sword fighting! I love almost anything “medieval” but sadly, I can’t say I love The Sims Medieval.

I mentioned a few months back on here about how excited I was for the release of this game. It seemed like they’d announced it forever ago, so when I realized it was March 22, I ran to my local game store and happily managed to get one of the “Exclusive Limited Edition Content” versions. I had no idea what to expect as I installed it onto my computer, I’d seen trailers, but hadn’t read anything about how the game would actually work.

It turns out The Sims Medieval is very different from The Sims. You create characters, starting with your Monarch who lives in the castle, based on which structures you decide to place. You get a “doll house” view of the buildings when you play, which you can furnish and decorate, but you can’t actually change the structure in any way.

You can only play certain characters depending on which quest you decide to work on. You get a list of quests to chose from and can spend your quest points to accept them. You can only work on one quest at a time, and if you have to abandon the quest, you don’t get your quest points refunded. Each kingdom only gets 50 quest points to work with, and once those are spent you can no longer level up your characters or earn achievements. I found this out after building up my first kingdom, and was very disappointed that I had to leave all the characters I’d worked on and gotten attached to behind to start all over. I decided to keep playing though, because I was curious about what new types of ambitions could be unlocked for kingdoms and because each time you complete a kingdom, it unlocks new clothes and items.

My next kingdom had the ambition to conquer all the surrounding kingdoms. I don’t have specifics because I wasn’t able to do so, (which I’ll talk about in a moment) but there are about 8 neighboring kingdoms that you can spend your resource points (gained from completing quests) to ally with. Once you’re allied with a kingdom, a special quest will become available to annex them. I decided to ally with Aarbyville first, the pirate kingdom. The annex quest had three options, I could assassinate their leaders, I could invade them, or I could have a Bard marry their Queen. I didn’t have a Bard yet, but had just made a fancy new Spy I was itching to try out, so I decided to go with the assassinate option. I played through the whole questline, and at the very end I had killed all the gang leaders and was supposed to challenge the Queen to a duel. I did so, beat her, and nothing happened. I tried again, beat her, and again nothing happened. I’d run into a few glitches that I’d managed to work around, so I spent the next few hours loading and reloading the game and trying everything to get my duel to count. Eventually I realized I wouldn’t be able to work my way around it, so I grudgingly abandoned the quest, losing 3 precious quest points that would have helped speed my domination along. In the final step to the assassination quest I was able to chose which of my characters should duel the Pirate Queen. I had chosen my Monarch, but I figured since I was now very familiar with the quest, I’d just speed my way through it again and this time I’d chose my Spy. After another hour or so I was finished the quest, and to my horror the same thing happened. I was forced to abandon the quest, losing another 3 quest points, and redid it using the invasion option, which worked fine.

By this time though I was quite frustrated and didn’t play for a few days.

I just went back to it this evening to work away on my manifest destiny, and after some very careful planning (because I would now have 2 less quests to use to complete my objective), I decided I would take over Burdley next. I was using my knight to hunt down squirrels when my daily objective popped up to “Duel the Challenger”. I’d done this many times before, having leveled my first knight to 10 (which is the level cap), so I headed out to lay down a knightly beating. I dueled him, won, and the objective did not complete. I thought, “oh no, not this again” and dueled him another time. It didn’t work.

Now the daily objectives are different from your quest objectives. You get two daily objectives each morning at 9am, and you complete them throughout the day to gain experience and up your overall quest progress rating. If you manage to get a Platinum rating, you get bonus resource points, of which I was sorely in need after my glitchy Aarbyville takeover. I decided I couldn’t miss that daily, sure it would have only been a debuff and some missed xp, but honestly I was just sick of things not working. My boyfriend had run into even more horrible time consuming game destroying glitches than I had by this time, and a few of his had been fixed by exiting right out of the game and restarting. I figured I’d try that, so I hit “save and quit”. What pops up next but a blue screen of death! So windows crashes, I restart my computer, start the game up, click on my kingdom and what message do I get? “A serious error has occurred while loading “Sovereign.tsm”. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application.” Restarting the application didn’t help. I guess when the game crashed my computer, it also corrupted the save, so I’m going to have to start that kingdom all over again. I don’t think I’ll bother.

For a spin off game of something as popular as the Sims, you’d think they’d put a bit of money and testing into it to make sure it actually worked before releasing it. There are numerous quests that are bugged or don’t work at all. A large number of people have issues with their video card clashing with the game and restarting their computer over and over. I read about someone who had to actually reinstall Windows because the game went so wonky and on top of it all, it’s basically impossible to make a character that actually looks good! I get that it was medieval times, but I’m sure they could fashion some kind of makeup! So far I’ve managed to make one slightly pretty elfish Sim, but that’s only one out of nearly 20.

I’m disappointed, to say the least.

This game had great potential and even held some appeal for people who weren’t big Sim fans. It was a cool idea for an adventure game, and rarely when things were working, it was a lot of fun and slightly addictive. Unfortunately if this had been the first Sims game I’d tried, I’m sure I’d never play another. I’ve wasted many hours trying to fix things that shouldn’t have been an issue, and also feel like I wasted my money on a game that was not really finished. It does have the option to be updated, and if they fix all the problems with it in a patch someday that would make a world of difference, if I could ever get over the anger and frustration I’ve accumulated playing it this past week to ever give it another shot that is. So honestly, if you’ve been considering picking up a copy, don’t!

Have any of you been playing it? Are you as fed up and frustrated with it as I am? Have you come across any bugged quests or items to stay away from? Leave me a comment and let me know!

I’m in search of something to replace WoW .. but I haven’t been having much luck. So far everything has gotten frustrating or boring really quickly. .
- New Donkey Kong is really good but it gets hard and you need to die too many times before figuring out a level. I’m still working on it..
- Borderlands held my interest for a while, it’s a great game but I think I’m tiered of leveling and drops. Too much time comparing guns.
- Fallout New Vegas, didn’t realize it was another leveling type game .. didn’t really give it a chance.
- Kill Zone 2, Halo killer? Not really .. something about it bothered me, too formulaic. I got a little excited at the beginning .. I thought they where going to spin the story so you played the glowing eyed aliens and attacked the humans. .. you would think that glowing eyes would be a pretty big disadvantage in combat.
- Red Dead Redemption .. Great feel although everything kind of tends to be the same-ish color and finding the enemies is sometimes impossible until they shoot at you.
Last time I took a break I guess I was lucky and found GTA IV, New Mario Bros, Guitar Hero and Bioshock. Those kept me away from wow for over 3 months
P.S. Great blog! .. I appreciate that it has a different perspective than most.

Kammler : I do tend to have some standards now that I do kind of base off WoW’s performance, lol. It’s just the first game I ever played A LOT and they were always working to make their game run well. Before playing WoW I really didn’t, if a game worked, awesome, if not, I still usually played it as thoroughly as I could. There was an update for the Sims Medieval released today, so perhaps I’ll give it one last chance, I like to try to be forgiving…

Deadfajita : Haha very true, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s what happened with the vampire game I love so much and recently went back to. When I played it years ago it was almost unplayable it had so many intrusive little bugs, but people patched the crap out of it and now it runs almost perfectly.

I understand what you’re saying, the game is buggy. I, personally, haven’t come across any bugs so far, but I’ve read a few forums where peeps are mentioning quite a lot of them. The only thing we do not agree on is the character creation. I’ve absolutelly loved each and every character I’ve made so far! And I enjoy the lack of make-up, ofc I wouldn’t mind it if there were some either.

Aw, I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad time! I have been playing quite a bit both on my desktop and laptop and haven’t encountered a single glitch.

If you want to get your 6 quest points back (or even add more), there is a cheat to set how many points you want. You have to change something in the command.ini file from 0 to 1 then in the game bring up the cheat window thing like normal and enter setQP. You can also do setKP for resource points if you want to make allies quicker.

Erentir : Hehe, maybe I’m just not quite as skilled at making pretty characters as I once was. I wish they had a Sims Medieval Exchange like they do with the Sims 3! I’d love to be able to see what kind of characters other players come up with!

Tasha : Oh dear, the temptation to use a cheat is very strong, but since they patched the game I haven’t run into any more quest bugs, so I may not need to. It’s good to know it’s possible though if I run into anymore quest destroying bugs and have to lose my points! Thank you!

I’ve had plenty of problems with bugged quests and it’s quite frustrating, to the point where I barely touch it and kind of wish I hadn’t bought it. *le sigh* And I was really disappointed by the character creation.

Also, I’m glad to see that you’re enjoying Rift! I’ve been playing WoW for three years and over the past year or so my guild has been slowly falling apart (nothing big happened, just people drifting away), and I’ve become so bored with WoW. I’m definitely looking to try Rift once this semester lets out!

Nicole : Even though the patch fixed most of the issues I’d been having, I haven’t been playing it nearly as much as I had been before getting epically frustrated with it either.

My WoW buds had all drifted onto other things as well, which is probably why it was so easy for me to transition to Rift. I’m still loving every minute of it, even playing solo 90% of the time, so hopefully you like it when you’re able to give it a try!

I decided I’d give the game a shot and picked it up some days ago. At first it was quite interesting; the story was fun and it was a totally new approach to The Sims game.

However, after completing New Beginnings (I think that’s what the first ambition is called) and finding out that in other ambitions, you controlled a different kingdom on a same territory and having to start all over again, I seriously freaked out. Basically, everything is repetitive and the only difference between the ambitions is the goal you have to complete?? WHAT A HOAX!

Coen : Yeah that was the first thing I noticed that I disliked about the game, and haven’t really played it at all since the first week. It is repetitive, and disappointing and even though I’m a completionist, the thought of completing a kingdom and then starting a new kingdom over and over in order to complete the game, just isn’t fun. If I did all the different ambitions with one kingdom, then I would have liked it!

Hehe I just got Sims Medieval, and finished the new beginning ambition, but felt upset when I saw that the only one to continue is the monarch leaving everything behind. He had a bard wife (level 10) and a kid! T_T lol.

I totally agree that if they made all ambitions done on the same land, it would have been a lot better.

After seeing how bugged The Sims 3: Late Night was, I wasnt surprised when I read the bugs you got. Hope EA puts more effort in testing before releasing a game.

I’ve faced numerous problems with this game (mainly in loading errors, but there were a lot of bugs, some have been worked out via updates and patches)… Great potential, but STILL needs work after how many months of being in stores? It’s sad actually. It’s hard for me to say that because I personally love The Sims. I’m currently trying to find my way around a bug that won’t allow my Knight to duel in the War Games quest. I mean there isn’t even an option to duel the person im supposed to.

P.S. the “loading saved game errors”, as theyre so common almost every person who has played the game has heard of them, have caused me to delete and restart my kigdom 5 times now! I haven’t even finished the first ambition because of it.

Badieh : I had such high hopes for TSMedieval, but they sure didn’t deliver! My monarch had a kid too when I had to start a new Kingdom, you spend all that time building relationships and back stories for all your characters and then you just have to leave them all behind and basically start over. Pretty lame…

I’ve been playing the new Generations expansion a bit lately, it seems rather buggy as well, surprise surprise, lol.

Addison : Wow, 5 times restarting!? You have more patience than me, lol. I had to restart twice and haven’t played since. It sucks because I am a big Sims fan as well, but this game just needed so much more polish!

i bought the sims medieval and the pirates and noble expansion pack and im pretty iritated with it. it always freezes and stops running and it makes me so mad. you would think they would have put more work into it but i guess now

I am so so sorry you had such a bad experience with this game. To be honest, I did not bought it because it was TOO expensive from where I am from so I download it and for me? its working to the perfection. Actually, the game that i can’t play is the sims 3 because the game crashes every time I try to open it so the sims medieval is my only option. I just wish they released more expansions. True, I don’t play it for a bunch of hours like I did with the sims 3 but what the heck, its entertaining. My only complain its the goddamn torture chair, i can’t never figure it out.

Paola : Thanks for your comment! I actually really enjoy the game now that they have fixed all of the game breaking bugs and added better character customization! I even bought the Nobles and Pirates expansion a couple months back, which is interesting but didn’t seem to add much to the game. I haven’t figured out that torture chair yet either! Definitely a solid game now though.

I bought this off steam a few days ago and so far I’ve had two severe glitches that completely stop me from progressing the game. In the quest where the monarch finds someone to marry and has children, after I made my queen take a bath she couldn’t leave the house. And I can’t see inside my bards house, and on the rare occasion it does let me see, all the graphics are muddled together. (Ex. Faces are pure skin tone and lack features. After spending thirty minutes trying to see inside the house, I clicked on the bards bed and told him to sleep. He stood by his bed with the action still up, but wouldn’t get in bed. I clicked on the action to cancel it, and it had the cross through it, but he still wouldn’t move or do anything else. I told i would just wait until he’s so exhausted e has to sleep, but that doesn’t work either. He now just has the command telling him to fall asleep behind the canceled action to go to bed. I really love the game but I can’t stand losing so much progress by going back to my last save.